Freelance Writing Jobs | Today's Articles | Sign In

Articles
Writers
 
Browse Sections
Home PC Support

Dealing with DOS - Part 1


  • External DOS Commands. These are programs that are part of the DOS. You can find these commands in your \DOS folder. FDISK is an example of an external DOS command. They are external as they are too big (or too infrequently used) to be internal commands.

  • Internal DOS Commands. These are commands that are stored within COMMAND.COM - one of the main DOS files. COPY and DEL are examples of internal commands. These commands are used so frequently that they are stored in memory at all times making them quick to run.

    Arguments

    Arguments tell a command what to work with. For example, suppose you issue a delete command. The computer needs to know "what" it is to delete. The "what" is an argument. Some commands require arguments (such as delete), but for some commands, arguments are optional (such as the DIR command). Some commands need more than one argument in order to work (such as COPY). Arguments are separated with spaces. For example.

    COPY SOURCE_FILE TARGET_FILE

    The source and target files are arguments to the COPY command.

    Switches

    Whilst arguments tell a command what to work with, switches tell a command how to work. For example, take the following command:

    DIR WIN.COM /S

    The DIR command is used to find files, in this case WIN.COM. So WIN.COM is what the command is working with. The /S is a switch which tells the DIR command how to work. In this case, /S means search all subdirectories (folders) below the current folder.

    A switch is always preceded with the "/" character (not to be confused with the "\" character that is used to separate folder names). (Note to UNIX users - isn't this annoying!) Again, a command may have more than one switch, each switch being preceded with the "/" character.

    Next week, we shall take a look at some DOS commands. I won't go through each and every command, just the ones that are useful - particularly if your machine crashes and you can't start Windows.

    The copyright of the article Dealing with DOS - Part 1 in PC Support is owned by Chris Cruickshank. Permission to republish Dealing with DOS - Part 1 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

    Go To Page: 1 2

    Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic